In recent years, control apparatuses for controlling equipment provided in power consumer facilities (see, e.g., Patent Literature 1) have attracted public attention. Such control apparatuses are called energy management systems (EMS). Examples of the equipment include a load (e.g., an air conditioner, a lighting tool, or a refrigerator) that consumes power for operation, or a distributed power source (e.g., a photovoltaic generation apparatus, a storage battery apparatus, or a fuel cell apparatus).
Examples of the control apparatuses include a home energy management system (HEMS), a building energy management system (BEMS), a factory energy management system (FEMS), a store energy management system (SEMS), and a cluster/community energy management system (CEMS). The control apparatus transmits a request message for requesting execution of a function, which is designated from a plurality of functions of the equipment, to the equipment via a network provided in the consumer facility.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of smart phones, tablet terminals, and the like are used as operation apparatuses for operating the equipment. The operation apparatus generates an operation instruction for the equipment in accordance with information input by a user, and transmits the operation instruction to the control apparatus. The control apparatus acquires the operation instruction from the operation apparatus, generates the request message in accordance with the operation instruction, and transmits the generated request message to the equipment.
The operation apparatus enables remote control of the equipment from the outside of the consumer facility. Controlling the equipment from outside, however, requires higher consideration on safety than operating the equipment from the inside of the consumer facility, because checking the operation state of the equipment from the outside of the consumer facility is difficult.